STORY: ‘Clouds’ peeps into the last few months of Zach Sobiech, a high schooler who had lost his life to bone cancer back in the May of 2013. This biography is an ode to Zach’s zest for life, passion for music, the prom that he couldn’t attend with his ladylove and the best friend’s heart he had had to break.

REVIEW: Unlike some teenagers, Zach (Fin Argus) isn’t lost and finds his true calling early on in life: music, albums and the world tours he has to embark on once those albums hit it out of the park! Even with cancer recurrence, Zach’s writing songs, proxying for his best friend Sammy (Sabrina Carpenter) when she gets cold feet before a school gig and is pursuing the local cutie-school ballerina Amy (Madison Iseman). However, the doctor has some heart-breaking news to deliver: Zach is terminal and has only a few months to love. Through ‘Clouds’, Justin Baldoni humanises the pain of a life less lived (not in the literal sense) and gives us an insight into the emotional turmoil of the loved ones, who watch their beloved shrink and eventually perish. One traumatic day at a time.

When the real Zack Sobiech uploaded his original number ‘Clouds’ on a video-sharing platform, it garnered instant recognition and his popularity blew up overnight, resulting in a professional deal, a concert and a party. The film – also co-written by Casey La Scala, Patrick Kopka and Kara Holden – is loosely based on Zach’s mother Laura Sobiech’s book ‘Fly a Little Higher’.

There are no pre-funeral messages in Baldoni’s ‘Clouds’ and none of the characters get a proper goodbye; the tonality and setting of this memoir is laid on honesty, poignancy and rawness. And the mood is perpetually gloomy with all of the main players, Zach included, talking in hushed tones: as if it’s an attempt to cheat death one last time. The film is a bare-open of the tumultuous journey of the Sobiechs in their 17-year-olds final days and how a mother, quite naively, packs everything up and goes on a trip to Lourdes (France) for a miracle to happen. The scene where the mother-son duo submerge their heads in the Holy water as tears of hope and helplessness trickle down their cheeks has to be one of the finest scenes in ‘Clouds’. Another aspect to Zach’s personality that makes an appearance here is the forced chirpiness in the face of adversity and the subsequent emotional outbursts when the façade gets too heavy for him to carry. In one of the many intense encounters, a love-struck Sammy cuts through the eerie silence in her room by scribbling in her dairy – and demanding an answer in return – “Tell me something you haven’t told me before?” To which, a teary-eyed Zach replies, (again, in writing) “Before I walk through the door, I adore you… I adore you… I do.” In that moment, we wish what would have happened had Zach been in love with Sammy and not Amy. The chemistry between Fin Argus and Sabrina Carpenter is one that cannot be taught during readings and at closed rehearsals; the pair is synchronised and how! Rob Sobiech does his bit to help his son realise the dream of driving his dream car when playing pretence becomes an overbearing task for this doting dad; its where you learn the real tragedy has just begun.

With all that happening at the background, the focus still stays on Zach and maybe that’s the reason why Fin Argus and his relationship with Madison Iseman’s Amy remains underdeveloped, so much so that we find ourselves even half-hoping his ‘promposal’ is for the one he has stronger ties with – Sabrina Carpenter’s Sammy. There are few scenes between Argus and Iseman to justify the intensity of their first and forever love. Neve Campbell and Tom Everett Scott as the distressed parents juggling hospital visits and organising daily cheerathons at home render devastatingly beautiful performances. Fin Argus’s character shift from being just a regular, funny teenager to someone puking his lungs out and wrestling for life at the crossroads of death is marvellous and has delivered a performance that evokes pain and pity. Sabrina Carpenter – ‘not a third wheel but his wing’ – shares an unmissable chemistry with the lead actor and her character’s feelings are pathos personified.

Since music plays a vital role in this biographical drama, we thought we should talk about Brian Tyler’s music: nailed it! The original track ‘Clouds, ft. Zach Sobiech’, ‘Fix Me Up’, ‘How To Go To Confession’ and ‘Blueberries’ are total gems.

Once the credits role, we are taken back to the real Zach’s life through home videos and in one such tape, an upbeat Zach says, “You don't have to find out you're dying to start living,” and he couldn’t have been more right.